The Gilly Salt Sisters (46 page)

Claire shook her head and took a sip of milk. “It’s his tennis morning.”

Dee bit her lip and tried to hide her disappointment. Dee had been as meek as a lamb about not contacting Whit, not even once. She knew a good thing when she had it. In spite of the creepy stories about all the little dead boys around this place, she didn’t want to get thrown ass over heels off Salt Creek Farm in her current condition. She needed Jo’s and Claire’s help—for now at least. In fact, aside from her appointments at the clinic, Dee hadn’t even left the place at all, content enough to read the trashy magazines Jo bought her at the supermarket, helping with the salt as much as she could, and getting ready for the baby, not that there was much to do there either. Jo had found a secondhand crib and changing table in the paper and set them up in Dee’s room, and Claire had brought home a pastel assortment of tiny pajama sets and about a month’s worth of diapers, and she’d amassed a bewildering collection of bottles, brushes, pacifiers, bibs, and a rubber bulb.

“For when the baby has a cold,” Claire said, laying it in the drawer of the changing table, as if that explained everything. After she’d left the room, Dee had opened the drawer and squeezed the
bulb, wondering if she was supposed to suction the baby’s ears, nose, or mouth, and for how long. Jo wouldn’t have the foggiest idea, and Dee didn’t want to ask Claire. Who was to say the baby would get sick anyhow, and why was Claire already appointing herself as nurse? She should stick to fussing over her horse, Dee thought. It was the one thing that seemed to love her.

Dee put a hand on the side of her belly while the baby writhed. It might happen anytime now, the midwives in Hyannis had told her. If she felt regular pains, they’d instructed, she should come in. She shouldn’t wait—not when they had to drive from Prospect. Claire, who’d driven Dee to her last prenatal visit, had insisted on accompanying her into the examination room, and she’d immediately reassured the midwife. “Someone will be with her right up through the birth and after.” She’d squeezed Dee’s hand. “Right, Dee?”

Dee hadn’t returned her smile. The midwife let her wriggle back into her maternity pants while the midwife and Claire had a discussion about pain medications during labor.

“Of course it’s up to Dee,” Claire had said, putting her hand on Dee’s knee once she was dressed, “but obviously my sister and I want her to be as comfortable as can be.”

My sister and I.
It was like having a pair of overprotective fairy godmothers as bodyguards. They meant well, Dee knew, but she was still wary of pissing the two of them off. A life with Cutt had taught her that a person’s mood could curdle like cream in vinegar, and now that she’d seen how nice Jo and Claire could be, Dee had no desire to discover what happened when they got mad. If they wanted to sit next to her while she sweated, moaned, and pushed this kid out, she would more than welcome the company. There’d be time to figure everything else out later—like how she was going to get in touch with Whit.

Surely he’d want to see the baby when she had it, and once he did, once he saw her holding his child, wouldn’t what he’d liked about her in the first place come rushing back to him? She hoped so. Besides, the man was a professed Catholic. Wasn’t he virtually
programmed to revere mothers cradling their infants? On the other hand, the mothers exalted in the Bible weren’t scorned hussies living with scorned former wives on land their lover wanted to own.

She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table and reassessed Claire. She still hadn’t moved, but now she was staring into space with a soft gaze, rounded cheeks, and her lips parted. Was that actual
contentment
on her face? Dee wondered. Before she could decide, Claire wiped her expression clean and readjusted her features into her original scowl. Dee sighed. Claire made it impossible to get a grip on her mood, and Dee couldn’t figure why she cared, but she did. She jutted her chin toward the bag of riding gear. “So… did you get what you were after?”

Claire chewed a cuticle. Her scowl deepened. “No.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Dee wasn’t sure why, but she was getting the impression that they were talking about two different things. “So it wasn’t worth the visit?”

Claire blinked, the fog parting before her once again. “What? Oh, you mean my expedition to Turner House.”

“Where else did you go?” But Claire stood up and paced over the counter, ruffling her already messy hair. She took out the electric mixer and a huge enamel bowl.

“I’ve got four hours before I have to go scrape the evening salt crust. What do you think? Lemon meringues? And maybe a baked chicken for dinner?” The morning was heating up something awful, and the idea of rich food nauseated Dee, but she forced herself to smile and nod.

She piled her own lank hair up on top of her head, wishing she had the nerve to hack it off, but that wasn’t her style. She wasn’t good when it came to cutting things out of her life. She let down her hair again and blew on the pulse points on her wrists. “It sure is salt weather, isn’t it? Hot, sticky, and still.”

Claire paused, an egg poised on the edge of the bowl, ready for cracking. “What did you just say?”

Dee put her arms down. Great. What had she done now?
Sometimes being around Claire was like trying to drive a car with terrible alignment. Dee had no idea where she was going or what she might hit. Jo, on the other hand, while a terror to look at with all her scars, was full of solid, no-bullshit phrases. When Dee did a crappy job pulling in salt, Jo told her so, and then she immediately told Dee how to fix the problem. “I just meant it’s real hot, is all.” Dee was relieved when Claire broke the egg and separated the yolk from the white. That little evil smile that Dee didn’t trust was filling out Claire’s bottom lip again.

“Do you realize what you just did? You’re marking the weather with salt now. You’ll be a real Gilly before you know it.” She discarded the last yolk and turned on the mixer, frothing the whites into foam and then stiff peaks, and then she whipped in lemon zest, cream of tartar, and sugar until the substance in the bowl transformed into something entirely new. Dee felt a bit like that herself, like she was turning into something else. Was it really a Gilly? She wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t her old self either. What with the baby and living out here, she was definitely becoming something she didn’t recognize. Unlike the meringues, however, she wasn’t sure that that something was making her any sweeter.

I
f the summer days made Dee irritable and anxious, the nights were a sight better. She knew she wasn’t the only one awake in the house (sometimes a line of light glowed underneath Jo’s door), but between the three of them, Dee was the only one who did anything about it. She roamed.

It was a habit she’d developed in Vermont after her mother had died and she was trying to come to grips with being stuck with her father. She missed him less with each passing day. Once in a while, if she was eating a fried egg or something, she wondered how he was getting on without her at the diner, but that speculation was more from the point of view of a bitter former employee and less as a bereft daughter. Now that she was near the end of her pregnancy, in fact, she was tempted to belly up to the Lighthouse
counter one morning and order every breakfast item off the menu, taking a single bite out of each one before sending it all back. It was just the kind of thing that would drive Cutt nuts. He loathed waste of any kind and had no room in his life for excess, and Dee guessed that included her.

Cutt’s military heart had never adapted very well to the patter of her footsteps running riot through his life, Dee realized. He’d passed plates to her over the diner counter and she’d brought them back empty, and that had mostly been the sum of things between them. By the time she’d started hooking up with Whit, Cutt had long since quit trying to map the coordinates of her comings and goings, and Dee had learned that while mouthwash and a shower covered up certain sins, silence concealed them even better.

But if she was able to scoot under the radar at her father’s place, it wasn’t so easy to do so on Salt Creek Farm. Even when Claire and Jo weren’t physically with her in the same room, the evidence of them was. Claire constantly left coffee cups unwashed in the sink, and Jo forgot to pull the shower curtain closed and clean out the drain when she was done in the bathroom. Someone’s socks were always wadded up on the bottom step, along with muddy boots in the hall, and Claire set used tea bags to weep on the counter. For Dee, who was used to a house as blank as a slate, the clutter was like having to listen to around-the-clock chatter.

And then there was the junk. Everywhere she looked—in every closet, on every shelf—odd collections of books, maps, machine parts, dismembered toys, and bits and bobs she couldn’t even begin to identify lurked. When the baby was born, she thought, she’d have to be careful or she’d put the kid down and lose him in a morass of scraps.

At least at night, the house quieted. Initially she stuck to the upstairs in her wanderings, plodding back and forth between the bathroom and her room, but then, as she grew more comfortable, she started heading downstairs, first for a glass of milk and a cracker and then for more informative purposes.

Tonight Dee uncovered Claire’s senior yearbook tucked high
up on a parlor shelf and flipped through the pages until she found the one where Claire and Ethan had been voted Most in Love. And they really did look it—their heads tilted together, a pair of matching grins plastered across their faces. Ethan’s cheeks were much rounder, and Claire’s eyes had a twinkle dancing in them instead of murderous sparks, but her face held all the same dangerous angles. Dee wondered what
she
might have been voted if she’d stayed in school. Sluttiest, probably, or Most Likely to Drop Out, but then she’d gone and done exactly that, so she guessed that was prophecy fulfilled right there. She slammed the yearbook closed and put it back. Behind her the room’s stone hearth took up most of the wall. Then came a pair of sagging sofas, a battered coffee table, and an ancient, shiplike desk shoved into the corner. Dee wandered over to it, opened its vast lid, and aimlessly began scuffling through the detritus within. There was a man’s watch that looked expensive. Dee fingered it, tempted, then laid it aside. Bills lay snarled in nests of old tidal charts, almanacs with their covers torn were tossed pell-mell, and a single cream-colored envelope with gilt script on its flap languished innocently under everything.

Frankly, it didn’t look that interesting, but Dee plucked it out anyway and squinted to read the fancy initials. It wasn’t easy. The script was faded and too full of spikes and loops. But that was Salt Creek Farm for you. Dee never knew what she was going to find. Something junky and boring-looking on the outside might really be a treasure. She started to open the flap of the envelope, but a pain squeezed her belly and she gasped and rocked back on her heels. It was shocking sometimes, how fiercely the baby could punch. She hoped it would stop doing that once it got born, or otherwise she was going to end up with a pair of black eyes when she went to change diapers. The baby twisted and gouged at her with as many of its sharp little extremities as it could manage, sending shocks all the way down through her bladder. Dee sighed in misery and slid the letter into her dressing gown’s pocket.

She’d just reached the bottom of the steps when the pains
began—not rolling Tahitian waves like the midwife had described, full of ukulele music and sunsets, but really bad ones that stole Dee’s breath and pinched something awful. She staggered sideways and grabbed onto the banister, but before she could catch her breath, another contraction slammed into her, knocking her to her knees.

This so better be worth it
, she thought, letting her head fall onto the lowest step. It occurred to her that when this was over, she just might kill someone, but just as she was deciding on the appropriate victim, something warm and sticky began running down the insides of her legs, a violent squeezing started low in her belly, and everything in front of her went mercifully black.

B
y the time Dee saw her son good and proper, he was nothing like the little blue ball that Claire claimed came out of her. “I was right there when they cut you open,” Claire told Dee, fixing her blankets, plumping her pillow even though Dee hadn’t asked. “Just like I said I would be. Right there the whole time.”